In early January, more than 6,000 journalists from around the world descended on Detroit’s Cobo Center for the annual Detroit auto show. For three days, they attended parties and briefings, interviewed executives and engineers, and participated in the annual ritual of picking their own personal winners and losers from among the fifty or so new car models on display. They wrote about Toyota’s unaccustomed “swagger” and Detroit’s “fresh thinking,” about Ford’s new muscle car and GM’s beautiful interiors, about the “sporty” Nissan Altima Coupe and the “snazzy” Chevy Malibu. “I just get tingles,” one exhibition-goer told the Associated Press about the new, supercharged Dodge Viper. Micheline Maynard, the Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times, said in an interview posted on the paper’s Web site that for reporters covering the auto industry, the Detroit show “is our Oscar night, our World Series, and our political convention all rolled into one.”

Outside the exhibition hall, however, it seemed like anything but Oscar night. The city of Detroit and the surrounding region were staggering from the effects of the severe retrenchment taking place in the U.S. auto industry. In the months before the show, roughly half of Ford’s 75,000 blue-collar workers in North America had accepted offers of buyouts and early retirement, and GM had let go about 35,000 hourly workers, a third of its U.S. force. Unemployment was up, housing prices were down, and stores on Main Streets in surrounding towns were being shuttered. Yet few of the journalists in Detroit seemed to notice. True, many were beat reporters assigned to write about sedans, vans, sports coupes, and light trucks, but still it’s remarkable how few took note of the really big story at hand—the dramatic demise of an industry that for the last century has been the...

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